The first of AMD's desktop APU designs to include tweaks defined by the Heterogeneous Systems Architecture (HSA) for better interoperability between the CPU and GPU portions, the first to include Graphics Core Next (GCN) technology and promising significant boosts in instructions per cycle (IPC) thanks to the new Steamroller core, it's fair to say Kaveri is a big deal for AMD.

The flagship of the Kaveri desktop line-up is the A10-7850K, designed to take over from the A10-6800K and compete with Intel's Core i5-4670K. The 28nm chip's 95W thermal design profile (TDP) gives it the headroom required for a base clock of 3.7GHz across all four cores with Turbo Mode reaching 4GHz - both a drop from the last-generation A10-6800K clock speeds, which hit 4.1GHz stock and 4.4GHz Turbo. Compared to its predecessor, however, the A10-7850K claims a 20 per cent boost in IPC - which should translate to improved performance despite the loss of clock speed.

The GPU portion of the chip, too, has seen a down-clock from 844MHz to 720MHz - but, as with the move to Steamroller on the CPU side, AMD is pointing to the shift to GCN and an increase to 512 shaders as more than making up for that in true performance. Indeed, figures released by the company show the A10-7850K running the PCMark benchmark some 24 per cent faster than an Intel Core i5-4670K and the 3DMark suite 87 per cent faster, compared to boosts of 15 per cent and 37 per cent for the last-generation A10-6800K.

As before, the chip supports four threads but this time offers improved cache memory: in addition to a boost from two 64KB L1 instruction caches to two 96KB caches, both L1 and L2 caches now benefit from associative sharing - designed to help the CPU and GPU cooperate on tasks, and a major part of the promise of HSA.

The company has confirmed that OEMs are able to pre-order the part now, alongside a lower-end A10-7700K part, with the first products to appear in the coming weeks. AMD has not, however, provided a date for retail availability.

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The flagship of the Kaveri desktop line-up is the A10-7850K, designed to take over from the A10-6800K and compete with Intel's Core i5-4670K

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figures released by the company show the A10-7850K running the PCMark benchmark some 24 per cent faster than an Intel Core i5-4670K and the 3DMark suite 87 per cent faster

This is remarkable marketing-bullcrap they're spilling around there.

The A10-7850k will nowhere come close to the performance of an i5-4670k... not even when saturn, mars and the moon are aligned at midnight. You simply can't count the iGPU-performance, as there's basically no software around that makes any use of it besides the stupid benchmarks.
And those who really need a GPU for their software simply buy a €75 HD7750 1GB GDDR5 and beat the iGPU of the A10-7500k yet again by a mile.

Seriously AMD, your marketing-stunts get worse and worse to make people believe that you're still up to par with intel.

And while we're at it... if you want to count the iGPU than compare yourselves against the Iris Pro chips from intel and see where this goes. The 21" iMac for example has the Iris Pro iGPU.

Originally Posted by adam_bagpuss@ jrs77 - i see your point but you need to compare like for like based on pricing not top end against top end.

AMD-7850K will likely be much cheaper than the Iris Pro CPUs. Depending on launch price it HAS to be compared with whatever intel part is in the same bracket.

The i5-4570R with IrisPro costs exactly $7 more than the i5-4670k and is built into every entry-level 21" iMac.

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Originally Posted by Harlequinladies and gentleman - the intel PR rep has spoken :roll:

many productivity programmes now use OCL , and the amd apu`s have already been shown to be faster than all the i7`s for homes use, using those programmes with OCL.

oh so it has a good igpu? lets not use it then shall we , because intel cannot compete!

AMD are correct - the APU`s are a match for anything intel has , when using the igpu. Look at the projected cost of the Gigabyte BRIX with the i5-4750R as an example.

its like saying FREESync isn't worth is because AMD can do it already at no extra cost - but please go any pay extra for G-Sync....

As stated above, the i5-4570R costs the same as the i5-4670k.

I'm not an intel PR rep at all, but aslong as AMD doesn't manage to deliver a CPU/APU that can deliver the CPU-performance of intels i5-offerings, there's simply no reason for most people like me to buy an AMD APU. Singlethread-performance of the APUs is laughable, which is pretty much critical for all current office-software and rendering-performance in Vray, Cycles, C4D, LuxRender, etc is aswell nowhere comparable with a $160 i5.

So what software would that be that makes an APU that interesting for John Doe?

There are some machines you can't just pop a HD7750 in, my HTPC for one, it has one expansion slot for freeviewHD tuner, it runs well on an A10-5700, iGPU performance here is king, it already has enough CPU power that I down clock and undervoltage it to 2.5Ghz for power/thermal considerations and so I can up GPU clock speed in preference, it can run a number of games on TV at a reasonable lick and I'd definitely drop one of these Kaveri in if a 512 core <65w chip drops.

The entire upgrade from my old x2 on HD3200 chipset which included CPU/MEM/Mobo was a bargain at ~ £160 I already had the cooler admittedly, don't think Intel could match the price/performance.

Originally Posted by Harlequinwhy are you using the cpu in C4D or luxrenderer anyway? GPU only mode is much much faster and that's where the APU`s shine??

and again - VRay RT settings can enable OCL for gpu rendering....

V-Ray RT is not for final rendering tho, but for live-preview. Currently I don't know of any render-engine used for final rendering that uses the GPU, not C4Ds built-in engine, nor LuxRender, nor V-Ray, as they cannot render complex materials, but only simple matte materials.

But feel free to show me one that I can use with my GPU for final renderings.

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Originally Posted by sandysThere are some machines you can't just pop a HD7750 in, my HTPC for one, it has one expansion slot for freeviewHD tuner, it runs well on an A10-5700, iGPU performance here is king, it already has enough CPU power that I down clock and undervoltage it to 2.5Ghz for power/thermal considerations and so I can up GPU clock speed in preference, it can run a number of games on TV at a reasonable lick and I'd definitely drop one of these Kaveri in if a 512 core <65w chip drops.

OFC there's some scenarios, where these APUs make sense, but usually a small i5 paired with a HD7750 is better and not that much more expensive.

Originally Posted by jrs77there's simply no reason for most people like me to buy an AMD APU. Singlethread-performance of the APUs is laughable, which is pretty much critical for all current office-software and rendering-performance in Vray, Cycles, C4D, LuxRender, etc is aswell nowhere comparable with a $160 i5.

So what software would that be that makes an APU that interesting for John Doe?

I could be getting in a muddle, but im not sure AMD is targeting office or rendering type work loads. From my perspective they are targeting the low to mid range market, the vast majority of the market that want a cheaper do it all system with the possibility of adding a discreet GPU should they need better graphics.

Something like Johnny's first Steam machine that they can slot a graphics card into next Christmas.

Originally Posted by Corky42I could be getting in a muddle, but im not sure AMD is targeting office or rendering type work loads. From my perspective they are targeting the low to mid range market, the vast majority of the market that want a cheaper do it all system with the possibility of adding a discreet GPU should they need better graphics.

Something like Johnny's first Steam machine that they can slot a graphics card into next Christmas.

The vast majority of PCs is used for office and casual graphics and multimedia-editing. That's the market.

Originally Posted by GuilleAcousticFor rendering ... just buy a caustic accelerator card. It's cheap and efficient :D. For the rest, I won't buy anything that do not have ECC memory for professionnal use, but that's just me.

For professional use you might consider a server with a few more cores as a render-node :p

Going to try and keep up with how these perform, currently use two APUs, one in a media pc I built for the family over Christmas and another (without the iGPU) in my main rig, think they're great for the money.

No idea if they compete with an i5, but then again they don't cost as much so they shouldn't need to.

Originally Posted by jrs77The vast majority of PCs is used for office and casual graphics and multimedia-editing. That's the market.

Yup forgot to add those in as well its still what i think AMD chips are ideally suited for.
There is no denying Intel has AMD beaten when it come to shear grunt, but IMHO AMD has them beat on the value front others may (and probably will) disagree with me though

Use APUs in a few HTPCs that I have, Would I ever use one in a performance built pc no I would not. More intrested to see what there next FX cpu will do, A more competitive AMD is good for everyone wether id buy one or not is different matter.

Thats AMDs problem getting enthusiasts intrested in there cpus again. For most enthusaists though a A10-7850k is not going to be enough. A top end fx that can compete across a whole range of benchmarks instead of just Multi threaded stuff now that would get people intrested.

Im a stratagy and Race gamer how well it performs in fps games will never effect my purchase decisions. If they show its a wonderful CPU for PA or Starcraft 2. Or some of the race sims I play hell I might even buy one. As it is my aging i7950 is 20-30% quicker at its overclocked speed of 4ghz than any cpu AMD makes in those games.

Value coments are not relivent to me so I dont count them as pros or cons. Im in a position where a budget is not really what I care for in PC performance. Alot of people are in similar positions or AMD would be doing alot better than it currently is.

Prof usage is Tesla cards if your work load supports them. Racks and Racks of Tesla cards thats what most of the top performing computers are using. Backed up by racks and racks of Intel cpus in most cases.

In a business sence ive seen more Tesla / Duel cpu intel builds in recent years than ever before but thats because the software has finally caught up to it. Ecc Memory costs more than the Cpus in most builds.

ECC memory + pro motherboards can be more cost than any GPU or Cpu you can care to list anyway.

Lets not for get power consumption. I don't know what idle is, but that Intel i5-4670k is 84w versus 95w for the AMD Kaveri. Lets not include the fact that the Haswell processors have been shown to consume signficantly less power under idle and light load than Ivy Bridge did, which were 77w TDP processors.

So odds are good that the Intel processors and whole systems, with identical hardware configurations other than processor and motherboard, are probably going to consume between 15-40% less power (and likely run quieter as a result). That isn't a big consideration for lots of people, but it is for plenty as well. Example a business where they look at their power bill and think about the fact that an Intel built system might end up costing them $15-30 less per year (both between the machine power consumption and possibly increased cooling costs for the office), per machine on their electric bill, which even if the AMD system is cheaper, means it would need to be at least $15-30 per year of life expectancy of the system cheaper to be worthwhile.

At least if the IT planner is looking at total cost of ownership. That means if the business is thinking of a 3 year desktop life cycle, the AMD system would need to be $45-90 cheaper to be competitive on total cost of ownership.

The AMD systems deffinitely have their place for really low cost systems and for HTPCs in some cases. Outside of that they aren't worthwhile IMHO. Intel's IGP with Ivy was good enough for very casual gamers and most typical users (actually most typical users who don't do anything heavier than something like FB games, FB, email, maybe word, IE and similar would/were happy with Sandy level graphics).

Haswell either what is included in regular desktop graphics now, or better yet the Iris pro graphics (in the even lower power consumption 65w TDP desktop chips, which are barely more expensive than high end core i5) are just fine for most people. Hell, they'd probably be almost good enough for me for most of what I do. The Iris pro is certainly faster than the 5570 GPU I am running right now (that said, I do want to look at getting a 650ti or 7790 or something sometime soon).

So I see AMD chips as something you are going for the cheapest build possible or for select cases where you either need the most compact, highest graphical performance HTPC you need, or a gamer on a very, very strict budget. That doesn't cover a whole lot of buyers/users these days unfortunately.

From a personal perspective, few things I use take advantage of OCL. Some, yes. Photoshop CS6 does, but frankly most things that can take advantage of the GPU see relatively little difference moving from one level of graphics to another. The HD2500 in my i5-3570 performs GPU accelerated filters nearly as fast as my 5570 or the HD4000 in my laptop. The difference from one to the other is at most 1 second even for significant liquify filter changes, for example. One might take 4 seconds on the 5570 and HD4000 and maybe at most 5 seconds on the HD2500.

I am sure there are plenty of OCL workloads where faster graphics will see significant speed up, but CS6 is about the only thing that supports OCL that I use. Yes, browsers have GPU acceleration now, there isn't much of a difference between GPUs though (that I have seen any evidence of). Handbrake mainline build doesn't use OCL and for the beta builds where you can use OCL for decompression the speed up on an overall encode isn't all that large and is signficantly less of an impact on overall encode speed in comparison to having a better CPU in the machine versus a better GPU.

That is pretty much it for what takes advantage of OCL in my experience in my environment.

What I really don't understand is that if AMD can get so much performance from the GPU side of their APUs, why are their dedicated GPUs so power hungry? Especially when looking at their lower to mid range cards which seem to be on par with their APU performance.

Same Ol' AMD, they talk the talk but just can't walk the walk. Just how these PR stunts keep coming out but when the real world review comes out all the fanboys seem to disappear is beyond me. Funny how that tends to work.

I would like to butt in and tell you all that the word 'Kaveri' is a slightly informal word for a 'Friend', something like 'Buddy', in Finnish.
Which is highly ironic when you take into account the way this thread has gone.

AMDs CPU devision made less profit last quater than the quater before. The problem always was that they are not selling. Or we would not be discussing them as we are as they would likely still be very competitive.

Mantle is already late to its own party ( bf4 promised pre 2014)

As for ARM till board manufacture make motherboards that I can buy and there's chips for sale that I could purchase in the desktop space its a waste of space. Whilst still somehow below AMD in servers.

Don't think the apus are bad I just want a different chip. As I've said before if they made a chip that had good single thread performance for those of us that need it then they would probably gain a buyer.

Till that time they are very difficult to recommend in Stratagy or racing genre. Where 90% of the engines are single or duel threaded at most.

AMD fans are good at ignoring markets others care about as they can't get a benchmark to show them in a positive light. I own 2 AMD chips in htpc machines and 2 intel chips. So I do actually buy from both companies unlike most in this argument.

As you just said 90% of sales are not retail but AMD made the decision to pursue there current market sector which is heavily retail based.

Tvs pvr and whatever else is not really desktop pc related. There's one ARM sorta pc which is the chromebook which is basically a big web browser with a keyboard for the record.( that joe public would know about)

If you have a small ish budget you can buy AMD and it will do you fine, problem for AMD is people with small budgets have moved into tablets.

Once the next high end fx chip is released hopefully soon you never know what will happen.

AMD were trouncing Intel for a while (first to market with 64-bit CPUs and first to market with dual core CPUs). It all seemed to fall apart when they merged with ATI. Since then, Intel have been winning the performance war by quite a margin.

Intel went off the rails with the P4 architecture, which gave AMD a huge opportunity to step in to with the Athlon XP family. Problem is, Intel took the hit (eventually) and came back with the Core family of CPUs which have been knocking it out the park ever since (well, not counting the early Core Solo models that were basically tech demos of what was to come in the Duos and Quads). AMD just don't seem to have gone and done a complete overhaul in a similar way, just rely on throwing more cores at the problem (whereas Intel used to throw more MHz). Thing is, single or dual thread is still very very common, so AMD's approach isn't universally successful.

NB: this ignores my Macs which range from G4 right through to the Intel Xeons, and also stopped me from building more PCs during what was AMD's Athlon 64 heyday. The jump from my Athlon 4200+ to a 2500k skips over several years of Core Duo MacBooks and octocore Mac Pros.

How many millions play DOTA2, LOL and SC2? These chips are certainly fast enough for those games and you know you get excellent graphics driver support. What's not to like?

While, yes, Intel is certainly faster and orders of margin more efficient - and we all like fast stuff - we are in the upper tier of users. What is difficult for bit-techers to appreciate is this level of price : performance is very competitive for mainstream users. But did you know over 50% of all Intel motherboard sales are H61. How many here would consider one? How is that getting the best performance? The biggest graphics card sales volume is around $100. Is that even worth buying to us?

So, yes, it won't win benchmarks but I don't sit around all day running SuperPi, Cache latency statistics and 3DMark; rarely does anything tell you what day-to-day PC use will be like. Many people just want to know if it's good value, it's 24/7 stable and it'll last 2-3 years. Just because AMD don't have the high-end sewn up doesn't mean they are 'DOA'.

I did notice, though, that it uses HSA which is found in the PS4, so theoretically if the devs know what they are doing you could have PS4 quality titles on a PC costing around the same.

I see Mantle is touted too.

You can slag off AMD APUs all you want, call for AMD's demise, but at the end of the day they sell well.

Except Sony made the wise choice of pairing their rather more powerful SoC with 256-bit GDDR5. Kaveri on the other hand is going to be very bandwidth constrained with it's dual channel DDR3.

We saw almost linear performance scaling with A10-6800K as DDR3 frequency was increased to provide more bandwidth to the iGPU. Kaveri will suffer the same problem, only more so due to having more iGPU execution cores.

Don't get me wrong, I like and support where AMD is going with Kaveri, but I would like to see it live up to its real potential. That means at least quad-channel DDR3. I just can't understand why AMD crippled their own chip to save a few bucks.

The stock memory frequency for DDR3 on 7850K is 2133, up from 1866 on 6800K, so a little boost, and on a decent MB (and expensive memory I guess) you should hit 2666/2800.

Quad-Ch DDR3 would have caused a design cost that far outweighs the systems design. That's why Intel only use it on their super-high end for example. Additional layers, design time, qualification is all cost, which MB makers will be less inclined to do and some of those costs are inevitably past onto the consumer (4-->6 layer PCB for example and needing to buy 4 DIMMs).

Again it comes down to respective price : performance. Yes, you could get exponential performance with quad channel or GDDR5 'DIMMs' (there is no JEDEC standard and the tolerance to trace length variance/EMI in GDDR5 is much, much less than DDR) or even AMD could make a much larger physical chip and solder GDDR directly onto the substrate much like a mobile GPU. This would yield profits in AMD's favor as they could charge a more premium price (think Intel R series). It's the channel that would not accept it though.

SC2 has been out 3 1/2 years . at current selling rate - MS and Sony will suprass blizzard sales by easter.

90% of people using pc`s only want web browsers , candy crush , sending emails , looking at funny movies and cat pictures and light gaming, and that's where AMD shine. they can play LOL , DOTA and SC2 - maybe not on `ultra high` settings , but well enough at `HD` settings.

the chromebook is powered by intel (bar 2 of them - 1 Samsung and 1 HP) the rest all have Atom`s or similar. And why dismiss it? chrome as an OS is built around a web browser!

Originally Posted by CowBlazedAPUs have a place. Just look how hard Intel has been scrambling to keep up with their IGP in the last few generations. They realize how important graphics power is becoming.

What is odd though is that with Iris Pro they already have a iGPU that can easily compete with any APU AMD have available (including Kaveri), yet they onlty include it on very specific CPU's (I forget the model).

I assume this is down to complex cost / yield / go knows what else reasons but it seems odd from a consumer point of view - esecially as there appears to be a market for them.

A core i3 with Iris pro level IGPU would offer signifiant competition to AMD's FM2 APU's if it existed.

I am quite liking the performance offered by the X4 760K system I recently built for my wife (basically a 6800K without the iGPU but at ~ 60% of the cost). As the MB supports it, I would love to drop in a Kaveri based "Athlon" to see if the touted IPR improvements actually make a different to real world apps. I have no need for the iGPU element as the system has a HD7850 already.

Originally Posted by BindibadgiIris Pro with eDRAM costs Intel a lot of money, because its eDRAM is a second IC connected with 'brand new' interposer (Wide-IO) technology. They are first to mass-market with it.

Depends on how you define 'mass market,' surely? The AMD APU in the Xbox One has on-board eDRAM Iris Pro-style, and that's sold three million units since late November.

Originally Posted by GeorgeStormI haven't read anything about IrisPro, it's just as good/better than the AMD iGPUs?

Iris Pro is faster than the iGPU in the 5800K and most likely the 6800K as well (given the latter is only marginally faster than the former). It is somewhere between the current top end AMD APU 's and a GT640 in terms of overall performance. At a rough guess I would imagine Kaveri will be slightly in front GPU performance wise - depending on the game in question and the settings used (and of course the DDR3 memory being used in the system tested).

Unfortunately it is only available with very specific CPU setups - i5 4670R & i7 4770R+ I am not sure what else.

Originally Posted by xaser04Iris Pro is faster than the iGPU in the 5800K and most likely the 6800K as well (given the latter is only marginally faster than the former). It is somewhere between the current top end AMD APU 's and a GT640 in terms of overall performance. At a rough guess I would imagine Kaveri will be slightly in front GPU performance wise - depending on the game in question and the settings used (and of course the DDR3 memory being used in the system tested).

Unfortunately it is only available with very specific CPU setups - i5 4670R & i7 4770R+ I am not sure what else.

I didn't realise they'd caught up so much, from a quick google those cpus don't seem to be very available? And they don't exactly cover the same market I guess coming in 150%+ of the cost.

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Originally Posted by jrs77For most people a smartphone or tablet is great and totally sufficient for mediaplayback, browsing the web or even office. Most people don't need PCs anymore.

True, but I was meaning even people who play games, should have clarified.

Originally Posted by GeorgeStormTrue, but I was meaning even people who play games, should have clarified.

Tablets and smartphones are very popular for playing games. It's actually a bigger market than consoles or PC-gaming.

If we could connect all kinds of input-devices to our smartphones and tablets - which is actually possible via bluetooth - there's no reason why we couldn't play FPS or RTS on these devices, like we do on a console or a PC. The graphics become better and better on these mobile devices aswell.

So load your game from the appstore, connect keyboard and mouse via bluetooth, connect your smartphone or tablet to your 50" TV and start having fun. It's totally possible from a technical POV and all that's missing is the imagination of the developers.

The direction AMD is heading with their APUs is basically allready existant, just with less power. So instead of designing such APUs for the desktop AMD should 100% concentrate on mobile APUs as the desktop PC for homeusers is a dying specimen. Desktop PCs are ment more for work these days and that's exactly the area where the APUs lack performance aslong as no software is getting optimized for their HSA.

Is that why 300 million of them were sold last year versus 100 million tablets ?
Most people (1.7 billion) buy Android based smart phones and I'm not sure they are ideally suited if you want to do more than the basics, like email, web browsing and consuming media.

Originally Posted by BindibadgiThe stock memory frequency for DDR3 on 7850K is 2133, up from 1866 on 6800K, so a little boost, and on a decent MB (and expensive memory I guess) you should hit 2666/2800.

Quad-Ch DDR3 would have caused a design cost that far outweighs the systems design. That's why Intel only use it on their super-high end for example. Additional layers, design time, qualification is all cost, which MB makers will be less inclined to do and some of those costs are inevitably past onto the consumer (4-->6 layer PCB for example and needing to buy 4 DIMMs).

Again it comes down to respective price : performance. Yes, you could get exponential performance with quad channel or GDDR5 'DIMMs' (there is no JEDEC standard and the tolerance to trace length variance/EMI in GDDR5 is much, much less than DDR) or even AMD could make a much larger physical chip and solder GDDR directly onto the substrate much like a mobile GPU. This would yield profits in AMD's favor as they could charge a more premium price (think Intel R series). It's the channel that would not accept it though.

Yeah I know, and for the most part I agree. Certainly GDDR5 is out of the question. But quad-channel DDR3 would not have been such a big deal. LGA 2011 motherboards are not more expensive than LGA 1150 board with similar specs. Quad channel ram could have been done without a large cost increase. But the OEMs see AMD APUs as cheapo platforms. I just think AMD had a chance to change that perception with Kaveri.

Originally Posted by Corky42Is that why 300 million of them were sold last year versus 100 million tablets ?
Most people (1.7 billion) buy Android based smart phones and I'm not sure they are ideally suited if you want to do more than the basics, like email, web browsing and consuming media.

There's only that much PCs sold, because people use them for work, but how many people do you know who use their home-PC for working?

And tablets and smartphones are the same devices in different sizes, you need to combine these numbers. An iPhone has the same hardware as the iPad besides the screen.

Originally Posted by GeorgeStormI didn't realise they'd caught up so much, from a quick google those cpus don't seem to be very available? And they don't exactly cover the same market I guess coming in 150%+ of the cost.

Indeed and that is what I was aluding to earlier. This level of iGPU performance coupled with a cheaper core i3 would really put presure on AMD, as effectively Intel would be offering the same thing albeit with better power efficiency and CPU single thread performance.

Sadly Intel seem to have limited Iris Pro to specific CPU setups which are in a completely different price tier to AMD APU's. Cost is most likely a reason but it still dissapointing as I would love to see both CPU manufacturers really push the boat out in terms of APU performance.

CPU's nowadays all handle everyday home applications without too much hassle.

For home based APU's, the goal I would use to gauge if the product is something I would consider is GPU grunt.

Does the iGPU have enough graphical grunt to play Ghosts/BF4 at 1080P with medium settings, if it did, then I, sirs, would be suitably impressed :)

Kaveri is a nice step forward, it has it's own existing market to protect and has enough few features to perhaps present options in other areas.

I always live in hope that one day GloFo/AMD die-shrinks will get closer to the Intel products, this is begging to be a 16nm (or lower) part (x% power reduction, x% more speed) it would really show it's legs then.

Originally Posted by jrs77There's only that much PCs sold, because people use them for work, but how many people do you know who use their home-PC for working?

And tablets and smartphones are the same devices in different sizes, you need to combine these numbers. An iPhone has the same hardware as the iPad besides the screen.

Home working is probably a market so small no one keeps figures :p
My point was that in terms of market share its not a case of "Most people don't need PCs anymore." its a case of the casual computer user not bothering to upgrade that 12 year old XP machine that has been gathering dust in the corner, as their new ARM based smartphones does everything they used to do on the desktop.

For most people i would venture to say when they go to work that they still sit in front of a desktop PC, so its not a matter of most people don't need a PC but more a case of they no longer need them for use in the home.

I'm guessing Consoles are going to be AMD's biggest market, along with professional graphics, server and tablets.

Originally Posted by maverik-sg1I always live in hope that one day GloFo/AMD die-shrinks will get closer to the Intel products, this is begging to be a 16nm (or lower) part (x% power reduction, x% more speed) it would really show it's legs then.

That's the biggest problem for AMD currently I'd say aswell, seeing that intel has started pre-production runs on their 14nm node. Currently only for their mobile-parts however, but in 2015 we'll see the 14nm Skylake CPUs with DDR4 being released.

AMD seriously needs to catch up here.

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Originally Posted by Corky42Home working is probably a market so small no one keeps figures :p
My point was that in terms of market share its not a case of "Most people don't need PCs anymore." its a case of the casual computer user not bothering to upgrade that 12 year old XP machine that has been gathering dust in the corner, as their new ARM based smartphones does everything they used to do on the desktop.

For most people i would venture to say when they go to work that they still sit in front of a desktop PC, so its not a matter of most people don't need a PC but more a case of they no longer need them for use in the home.

I'm guessing Consoles are going to be AMD's biggest market, along with professional graphics, server and tablets.

That's exactly my point, and the corporate-sector get's lots of discounts and are happily buying intel i3 or Pentium CPUs as their iGPUs are sufficient enough for office-stuff.

Originally Posted by Gareth HalfacreeDepends on how you define 'mass market,' surely? The AMD APU in the Xbox One has on-board eDRAM Iris Pro-style, and that's sold three million units since late November.

eDRAM has been around donkey's years in IBM products (since GameCube iirc) but it's not connected by WideIO til now.

Iris pro is in most new apple MacBooks be it air or pro last I checked. That's who it was designed for after all.

I3 with iris pro Gpu would be some good performance but intel has little reason to do it. They don't want to compete at the bottom end of the market segment where profit levels are small.

They make a lot more selling 1 4770k than AMD makes selling 100 budget range chips.

You could compare apple to intel in the way they have went about this intel is happy to dominate the high end where profits are a lot higher. And leave others to the budget range sector. ( that story has been told before andriod dominates the smartphone sector but 90% of the companies make nothing at all in money.)

The iris pro they sell to apple is bringing them in a lot of cash. ( they got 1bil from apple for the last quater in chips, tiny in comparison to what they give other companies for chips but still) as I've said before elsewhere I think apple had a exclusive on the chip for a while as only now is the iris pro Gpu really heading into oem channels.

look at the relevant markets year on year - pc`s are declining at 7% year on year , wheras tablets have increased by 42% - and some analyst`s are already saying they will overtake pc shipments this year not next.

that's all pc`s - and the market is made up of workstations rather than home users.

as for price - the current OEM price for the i5 4570R is $255 in BULK

that's far MORE than the new kaveri is in RETAIL (pre ordering for $189)

so again you can buy an AMD based system for under the cost of the Intel part alone.

and again your spouting rubbish about android phones , Samsung had $55 BILLION in revenue for last quarter , 4 times as much as Intel.

not bad for an android using company ,

and as I said before - ARM make money (£113 MILLION in Q3 2013) , which isn't bad for company that doesn't BUILD anything itself and so doesn't have the manufacturing overheads.

I did say 90%. Well aware Samsung makes cash on andriod, it's the only company that has made enough of it though. Surveys last year had Samsung and apple above 100% of the profit in smartphones. With htc and Nokia both in negative equity, and blackberry dead I'm not really sure how that will of changed much. ( Nokia has sold out since that comparison was made so you can add in to the dead table) ( will be updated this feb)

Revenue is not profit btw, samsungs latest figures due this month will show how well or not they have done over Christmas( there forecasts are not great compared to last year). Arm made 113mil Samsung made 55billion so by manufacuring you make 50x the cash.

All the cheap Chinese knock offs make very little, googles own range is sold at cost as is amazons.

AMD needs retail a lot more than intel does due to the way it's took its processors. Intels money is made is the server market. That's been the main growth at intel in the last 3-4 years.

Originally Posted by HarlequinSamsung have squeezed out HTC which is company not OS. Nokia are now MS so they are pretty much windows (which btw is quite good now , the missus has a Lumia 520)

yes I know revenue isn`t profit , samsungs PROFITS were equal to intel`s REVENUE. and ofc they use ARM.

oh and the ARM quote was profit for Q3 2013 on a revenue of £187 million.

again pretty good for a company not building anything and another growth so that's 5 years worth of growth.

At least if your arguing with rollo or jrs77 at least stick to the topic.. This bears no relevance if my dads dogs puppies owners sisters 2nd cousin owned a mcdonalds branch that made.more money than burger king.
I only state this because I was enjoying the debate between you guys, whether hostile or constructive. ;-)

All these apus and Igpus lack one major thing be that's high speed memory access. The lack of memory bandwidth will always be a issue at high resolution gaming ( 1080p) no matter how powerful they make the actual Gpu.

HSA looks good and if they can get the java support before 2015 they could be onto a winner as this CPU has 8 compute cores according to AMD which gives it 12 compute cores by my maths for program's that can fully support it.

We are also approaching the limits in die space for how big it can surely go. Personally still wonder how much faster this Gpu bit could be with gddr 5 instead of ddr3 memory.

Just look at the ps 4 vs Xbox one pretty significant early performance leads for the ps4 in major titles.

As I've said before though the APU market is pretty small and unless it takes off in a big way I don't really see what future AMD will have in this market segment.

Personally want to see a fx8 core with decent single thread at a competitive price would be nice.

Performance has not exactly gone anywhere in the last few years a 1366 system with a 6 core CPU in it will still beat out any AMD system and anything but intels latest 6 core systems and that's coming on 4 years old now.

Really think both intel and AMD could use a kick up the arse to make a real CPU upgrade. Intel is happy to sell ticks and tocks for huge cash under no pressure from AMD, one good chip and intel might need to actually make something that would be a major upgrade for those of us that need it.

and 90% of home pc users wouldn't know if they had a tablet or a 2011socket monster , as they all play candy crush....

I agree about ram speed - for APU DDR4 cant come fast enough , you don't have the `real estate` for quad channel and then , that would push system costs way up - boards need to be thicker (as bindi said) and needing 4 ram sticks.

on die ram isn't the answer either - as said about the PS4 and xbox , we are already seeing that limitation , granted though its not mantle coded software. again though as bindi said , GDDR5 in a stick form would be very hard and expensive to make for home users since the tolerances are tight.

I can see AMD using ondie gpu in all platforms - with the gpu side being a huge math processors ala 487 style

Originally Posted by rolloReally think both intel and AMD could use a kick up the arse to make a real CPU upgrade. Intel is happy to sell ticks and tocks for huge cash under no pressure from AMD, one good chip and intel might need to actually make something that would be a major upgrade for those of us that need it.

Both AMD and Intel are busy fighting in the mobile devices markets nowadays to bother with a real CPU upgrade, its all about processing power versus power usage.
The same thing happened with the car, it used to be all about speed and damn the Mpg now its all about Eco this and that, and electric shopping trolleys.